Gareth Evans‘ The Raid has been elbowing faces and cruching bones during its five-month festival run, and, though the American release is still a couple of months off, Evans is getting ready for the follow-up. Any truly revelatory information has, thus far, been non-existent. Until now, as the headline already told you. During an interview with Collider, the filmmaker revealed quite a bit, namely that The Raid is actually the first of a trilogy.

He didn’t always plan it this way, however. Read his quote on the way the first sequel came about:

“[There was] a film that we tried to get up off the ground and couldn’t get done. While I was developing The Raid, I was looking at ways to kind of link those two scripts together because we had done all this choreography on that first film, we were like ready to go we just needed the finance to pull the trigger on it. Because I didn’t want to just abandon that project, I started to look at ways we could link the two together. So the one problem I had with that original script was that the lead role didn’t have an interesting enough backstory. As I was thinking about it, I thought ‘Well if I make this a continuation of the story from The Raid, it’ll work much better, and it’ll kind of add more ideas and add more different elements to it,’ so it’s actually gonna be the sequel to The Raid.”

Thanks to those all-important things like financing and worldwide recognition, Evans will have a lot more security when preparing The Raid‘s sequel — a movie he already has in a deep state of script development. Still, though only “about 20%” of the pre-existing screenplay’s story has to be changed — on account of how The Raid‘s plot functions — there lies a challenge in the dialogue, which has to be carefully rewritten to accommodate the underworld nature of his story. Which is to say, every line pertaining to “a new plot development or a new character” requires the examination of an entire script that lies before it. That, as you can imagine, is a little time-consuming.

(This is a smaller matter, but the previously-reported title of Berandal probably won’t be used, nor will The Raid 2. Since the movie isn’t set in a building, there’s no actual “raid” to speak of.)

Action-wise, we can expect something “bigger”; in this case, car-oriented fighting action. As he said, “I want to bring car chase elements to it as well. So we have like a cool fight scene where you go inside a car, fighting against four people as it’s speeding along a one-way.” But, other than how unbelievably awesome that sounds, the notion of this approach to action actually raises some interesting technical questions. For one thing, how do you handle this in a practical sense? Where does the issue of space factor into it? That’s something I’d love to hear more about — but it’ll have to wait.

That third movie, by the way? Evans says it’s “further down the line.” Or, for good measure, “[a] lot further down the line.”

Are you looking forward to more Raid films? Is there any interest on your part to see the first?